Saturday, March 2, 2019

Ante Up

 My entire life I have held on desperately to a basic crutch: I have no means or money to scan my negatives. I secretly relied on that to not pursue working with film. This year my wife demanded that I bought a good film scanner with our tax return, so I am forced to deal with my shortcomings and make the most of them. There is certainly an art to film, as is evident in this one frame. The original scan:



dust, roller damage from the film back, light leak, what appears to be a hair or piece of fabric on the film plane (as it appears on every frame of the roll), scratches, and some more dust. After a couple days of figuring out that an 800mp scan was impossible to edit, and another couple days of dust removal and reconstruction, I've got one frame... that still needs more work. This was the last frame on the roll, mind you, which is always a bit more tattered, but this is a big spoonful of reality to swallow. I suppose now I can fall back on my original excuse: I can't afford good, clean equipment. lol. This is a 50 year old Mamiya found in a dead guy's garage and given to me 20 years ago, complete with a light leaky back and a rare, but foggy lens. I fixed the light leak with electrical tape, but now the back is glitchy about registering film. The shutter used to randomly lock up, but I fixed that by bending a little piece of metal on the back. I've even tried taking the lens apart to clean it.
Here we go.

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